Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Saturday March 29, 2008 @04:42AM
from the slow-steady-creep dept.

anomalous cohort writes "CrunchGear has an interesting interview with the Director of Inflight Entertainment for the airline Virgin America, who discusses their adoption of Linux for the passenger's seat back computers. 'The ability to compose a music-video playlist is pretty cool and on the horizon. The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.'"

thank you for making this comment. There is just nothing even slightly interesting about this.
I mean seriously, does the operating system matter or is it the software on the operating system that matters? What the heck does Linux have to do with the playlist? Was it something that could only be done on Linux... or could they have used Windows, QNX, VxWorks, Mac OS X or other systems to also have a video play list?

Some suicide bombers may be in for a big surprised when they get to heaven.

True, and even if they do happen to be the right sex, there's no guarantee they'll actually be attractive. I mean, who wants to spend eternity shagging a whale? There's a reason some people never get laid.

In any event, the promise of virgin sex seems to work well on male suicide bombers... what I want to know is, what do they promise the female ones?

No. It was Windows. You see, Microsoft colluded with the developers of that software to crash and show the penguin. This was done to "show" all the business travelers that Linux is horribly unstable. See, you fell for it yourself. It was just FUD put there by Microsoft. Really.

Also Swiss Air, and Qatar Airlines from my recent experience. The Linux based in flight entertainment system is becoming a familiar sight and something I look forward to when flying longer haul sections of flight.

On a finnair flight from Helsinki to Tokyo last summer they appeared to be running linux on the personal touch-screen devices too.
It worked great and it was good fun watching a few flicks on it.
However, about an hour or two before the end of the flight they started rebooting over and over again - they were running some
red hat variant on 266MHz devices if memory serves me right. The screens up at the end of the walkways rebooted at that time too,
but seemed to be running windows, cant remember what variant though.

After ten minutes of rebooting I was secretly hoping the stewardesses would make an announcement to ask if there was a systems engineer on the plane...:)

Finnair also uses Linux entertainment systems, and they are also really flakey. Not all of them start to reboot at once, but every once in a while the screen goes black for some passanger and they have to ask the flight attendent to reboot the system...Well, I've only been on two Finnair flights as of late (fall of 2007) but I think there at least 5-7 crashes during the 9+ hour flights, in my compartment...On the other hand, obviously the problem is not with Linux itself (count that as kernel or the base op

Consultant: Entertainment is where it's at!
Executive: We need better entertainment.
resident tech guy: I'll make menus for them to pull up the movie they want.
Marketing: We already advertised that you can watch the next four years of movies on it, and that you can reach into the screen and feel the action.
resident tech guy: For sophisticated stuff, we need a whole OS.
Integration:(lies)I can give you hardware support.
tech guy: Where's that

I was on a Virgin flight a few years back and they had to reboot the unit next to me. So I got to see Tux then. I seem to remember it being a pretty nice system to use. It was way ahead of others I encountered around that time.

To add to the list - Cathay Pacific also uses Linux, Ubuntu if I remember correctly, for their entertainment system, and I also learned this when the system was having trouble and the nice stewardess rebooted it for me. Good to see the Tux is everywhere.

Definitely old news,I was on a delta flight a few years ago, when the system rebooted and people started to complain I heard a hacker a few seats say, "Hey it's the fault of that guy in front with the penguin computing hat on!".

Amiga shamigaIn my day we handy Tandy Color Computers with cartridges and all of our games came from Disney on cassette. It cost $800 for a 10mb hard drive and you worshiped the damn thing. If a download was over 100kb you begged your parents to stay off the phone.

Point is, who cares what the plane has? As a business traveler I have everything I need in my handy laptop bag.

If you really enjoy (or are obsessed with) having that flight map tracking your location, you might want to consider bringing a GPS on board. I bring my clunky Garmin on board, and you can see the ground speed, the vertical ascent rate, etc. I'm training myself to estimate, based on what I see out the window, the altitude of the airplane, distances on the ground (how far is that tall building from the edge of the lake there?), etc. Also, it hadn't fully hit me before using the GPS that the airplane makes

Since the GPS only receives signals and transmits none, no one can accuse you of generating signals that interfere with the aircraft function.

Incorrect.

Anything that has anything with electrons flowing and not flowing generates EM waves - interference. This is especially true of radio receivers who need an oscillator close to the target frequency (for common superheterodyne receivers), but also applies to things like the CPUs and LCD displays - usually a problem because they can have a nasty harmonic in the

Doom? They should at least be running a flight simulator of some sort. That way they never have to ask "by the way, does anyone here know how to fly a plane?". They can just check the flight sim stats and tap the person with the best score on the shoulder...

The Virgin Earth Challenge prize will be open to entries for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges that includes Branson, former vice president Al Gore, U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, British environmental writer and former diplomat Crispin Tickell, British scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery. The winning solu

He's very rich and successful, true (although Private Eye has been pointing out major issues with the capital structure of Virgin and the accounting tricks they use for years.) But tremendous wisdom? Puh-lease. He's a manic self-publicist with an ego the size of Marvin's brain.

I just flew Air Canada for the first time last week and you're right, the seatback entertainment systems are running Windows. And poorly. There are terrible delays when responding to touches (when it responds at all) and interface elements like buttons are slow to draw on the screen. On both flights (round trip), the staff warned us beforehand that we should "be patient" with the system as it's slow to respond, and "too many touches may cause it to crash," which requires a reset (of just the crashed cons

Actually, I had a trans-atlantic flight with NWA in February, and the seat-back systems in their Airbus A330 were running linux, and were on-demand. They had to reboot the system once or twice, and I got kicked out of my film once (into what seemed to be like a looping analogue video channel - maybe they were running both systems at once?), but other than that, the system worked rather well.

I tried that same system with NWA and had a blast with it. Watched 2 movies, beat some other passenger at trivia, and just had fun exploring around with it. I just wish they commissioned a video game hardware company to make the controllers. The controllers needed to be a bit more kid-proof, and having a fire button inside the d-pad wasn't a very good idea. That quickly turned a very long, boring flight from Tokyo to Detroit into a fun one. You sit watching movies & playing games, and time just flies by

Notwithstanding the company behind it, I imagined SCO Unix variants to be fairly reliable, while probably not a caliber of say Solaris or Linux, I figured it was better than windows...but IANAUnix Guru so feel free to enlighten me...

The LG TV [pcworld.com] I picked up last week runs Linux, which I noticed because the last page of the manual credits various GPL and open source software used in the TV, including Linux and Busybox and other projects. Props to LG for going beyond the call of duty in crediting their suppliers.

Heh. My aging sony tv (2 year old LCD) is running Linux, and their user interface is running on X. It is very funny to see it crap out after blinking several times when I connect a notebook to the vga port and start testing out video modes, although frankly I'm not quite sure why would it crap out that way.I am too lazy to look it up and link, but you can download the whole set of software running on the TV from their website.

...and by the way, note that the pcworld reviewer who wrote that negative review got 483 thumbs down for his efforts. On Amazon the set is highly rated [amazon.com], and I am more than pleased with it. Ideal match for a PS3.

Props to LG for going beyond the call of duty in crediting their suppliers.

That is sort of required by the licences. If you distribute binaries, you need to mention the GPL and make available any source for modifications (or something like that). Not exactly "beyond the call of duty".

Props to LG for going beyond the call of duty in crediting their suppliers.

That is sort of required by the licences. If you distribute binaries, you need to mention the GPL and make available any source for modifications (or something like that). Not exactly "beyond the call of duty".

There were not required to dedicate the entire back page of the manual to GPL credits. I thought well of LG when I saw that.

I flew with Virgin from London to Tokyo about five or six years ago and Linux, specifically Slackware, was being used then for the personal entertainment systems. I found a way of causing my client to restart and passed a happy five minutes watching the boot messages.

which is not only redundant, but an annoyingly stupid answer. You'd think that as long as they're talking about linux they'd get someone who wouldn't say something to the effect of "a mix of microsoft and windows" or for the oblig car analogy, "a mix of ford and thunderbird"...

I disagree. Remember that there are file servers and seat back computers, they could be running different distros. They could have slightly different setups in different planes. Second of all, Fedora and RHEL/RHED are quite different. Fedora is more bleeding edge, RH is more carefully tested and is fully supported. Your analogy of a parent brand vs its product is a little off. Fedora is its own brand even if it is developed by and sharing tech with Redhat, think a mix of "Ford and Mercury". Even if VA

Yeah, my analogy was bad, and I have to admit that from a PR perspective it works well enough. I just found that the statement "Redhat and Fedora" was redundant, being that Fedora is Red Hat. However yes, I am sure that he meant RHEL/RHED + Fedora... I'm just happy that I'm sober now and finally found the arrogant poorly written post I knew I made, whee!

Virgin Atlantic has also been using it for at least four years. It crashed 2-3 times on the flight that I took. It was nice in the fact that you could select the movie you wanted to watch and have it play right then and there, without waiting for the next showing like some airlines do.

A couple of days ago I had a flight on the Singapore Airlines A380, and their seat back entertainments system uses Linux too, with openoffice suite to let you work on documents. Whilst all of the file dialogs limit file access to just your USB drive, there are other ways to accesses the real filesystem of the unit. Looks like they make plenty of use of multicasts for video and audio, plus rtp for on demand personal video. Here is some interesting tidbits I discovered, amongst other:bits from syslog messages

FWIW - I liked the USB port because I was able to recharge my iPod while listening. Very sweet feature for those very, very flight schedules. It's not uncommon that I'll need 28 hours to get from my door to my final destination. Kudos to Singapore Air for that USB port.

FWIW - I liked the USB port because I was able to recharge my iPod while listening.

Jetstar (Qantas low-cost subsidery) also uses linux-based personal video devices, the digEplayer XT [digecor.com]. They aren't built into the seats, but rather passed out (to those who shell out an extra $10 for it) at the beginning of the flight. I also found the USB port quite handy, as the devices are basically big batteries with screens the front. They've also got ethernet ports, but I didn't find a way to hack those...

I flew Virgin America last week from DC to California and back and overall the experience was good (good ticket price, too!). The in-flight entertainment left a few things to be desired, though. Aside from crashing two or three times during flight, many features (including the "READ" feature mentioned above) were simply "not available." A friend on another flight said she was on a plane that couldn't receive a single channel the entire flight. The song playlists were not very responsive, either, with long h

I have to agree. I flew VA a couple months back and the killer features, like web browsing were just not online yet.. The in satellite reception was also not so great, JetBlue does a better job there.

I did enjoy the classic games running in MAME. But that also lacked polish, they didn't do a good job mapping the keys for the various games, and you couldn't hit meta keys so you couldn't reconfigure the key bindings yourself.

They also used black 000000h as their XVideo chromakey, which meant that when the video kept going when you were in some other app the video would leak into that app. If they had used 010101h instead this issue wouldn't exist and you would still get a black screen rather than a nasty blue or green one when video was starting up.

Overall, it was a good flight. The flight attendants were amazingly attentive. Who ever did the hiring should get a gold star.

I on a Qatar Airlines flight to Doha last month. Linux was in use there for their in-flight services (again, the penguin at the boot screen gave it away).Immediately after I had a flight from Doha to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian Airlines). Malaysian Airlines seems to use it as well as they seemed to be using the same system (at least with the plane I was in).

The READ section is also awesome in that it takes what is typically a bunch of wasted trees (excess newspapers, periodicals) and allows us to be more environmentally friendly and timely with things like news/event info/sports/entertainment etc.

Riiiight. Trees are biodegradable, renewable, grown for paper and lumber stock and have a positive impact on the environment. But hey, an electric gizmo on a jumbo-jet is better! The idea that we're "saving a tree" by recycling paper is harmless, but stupid.

In other words, only trees grown for paper have a positive impact on the environment. Trees that would have grown in rainforests that were cut down for plantations don't biodegrade or generate oxygen. Maybe they were ents instead?

I just saw this for the first time on a delta flight. I was really excited to see tux in the upper left while all the kernel messages ran down the little screen and seeing this happen on everyone else's screen. Every screen was not showing the exact same thing at the same time, so I'm thinking every seat has its own virtual machine. It seemed to be running an older version of redhat, but I don't remember what specifically I saw.I thought it would be really cool to just play chess to pass the time until I tr

I've tried out the Virgin America system. Half of the VA flights I went on lacked the hardware, but on the newer planes that have it, most of the features don't yet work.There are billboards around SF touting its in cabin IM features (chat with other passengers), but they weren't working yet.

I tried ordering snacks, but that didn't work either.

Movies cost something ridiculous like $8 to watch.

Most of the system is just a placeholder. And please, a seatback display is maybe okay for watching TV video clips,

So rather than watch a small display in the back of your seat, you're saying a tiny display on your iPhone is better???

And does the iPhone happily feed movies and music to you all the way through an eight hour flight without a battery recharge?

I don't know about the Virgin system but I took an eight hour flight on Emirates from London to Dubai last year, I was in standard economy class and the back of the seat entertainment system was excellent. I have no idea what OS it was running on but th

You are arguing that you'd rather watch something on a seat back screen? Have you ever been on an airplane?The "tiny" display on my iPhone can be held closer to your face. You can also double tap and pinch to make the tiniest text readable.

I can use my iPhone for as many hours as I like by plugging it into a standard USB battery pack via the dock connector. I can also plug it into my laptop and recharge it. I find that I prefer to watch movies on my tiny iPhone rather than pulling out my laptop and watching

You are arguing that you'd rather watch something on a seat back screen? Have you ever been on an airplane?

There you go, you see? Typical Apple fanboi reaction - starts writing a response before finishing reading the OP. Please reread it properly, that will answer the second question for you.

As to the first question, given that I'm not allowed to bring my own flatscreen TV on a flight, the seat back screen I used on the Emirates flight (now you've reread my message) was excellent. As far as I recall, I

You are too old to be expressing yourself like you are 16.By 46, you should know that time is valuable enough to avoid being a pedantic nut. You should also know the meaning of sarcasm and irony.

You should also be able to reasonably predict obvious risks. I haven't had anyone spill their drink on me in a plane yet (purposely or not), but I have spilled drinks on a laptop, and I have witnessed people spilling drinks on airplanes. In the last month, I managed to be sitting next to two different women who both

I was on a flight back to Australia on Emirates a few years back and the tv console I was watching crashed...
It was linux:)
I think that Virgin are just moving to a similar system to what Emirates has been using for years.

Song [wikipedia.org] had a headrest system years ago that let you listen to music, see the plane's status, and (my favorite) play a cool trivia game against other passengers. On one flight they didn't boot up the systems until after the passengers were on and I saw it run through a standard Linux boot sequence, complete with Tux in the top left corner. My phone was already off and I figured they'd finish booting before I could dig it out, turn it on, and activate the camera, so I didn't even bother to try to get a pic. I f

For about a year, now, I have been having to put up with their rubbish content and the 30I spiel during the safety session on by $5 for 1 hour of watching TV is a good deal.If you don't pay up, you get a flight's worth of commercials, back to back.ad nausea.over and overThe funny thing is, you have to "opt out' of having advertising in your face for the flight duration.If they used the opt out model everywhere, then drinks and snacks would be free until you decided you did not want any more! (as is)

I laughed when I read that page, but the reason it's funny is because it resonates as having a certain truth to it. If Microsoft really wants to bring an end to Linux, they could have no bigger impact than by spreading the meme that developing (or even using Linux) is like wearing a pocket protector and tape on the bridge of your glasses. They'd be able to do it too if Apple wasn't already in the business of doing the same thing to them with those television spots featuring John Hodgman as the PC. If you w

This association actually seems to help with Muslim airlines. During my Thailand flight with Royal Brunei Air, I discovered their Inflight Entertainment System runs on Linux. And does that since at least 2004.

If you want to be more environmentally friendly, stop working in an airline company and stop bugging us with this "Hey look! We spew our yearly CO2 quota flying forth and back between LA & NY but it's cool because we replaced newspapers with Linux machines" crap.

Thank you.

...and only use your computer for important things like posting self-rightous BS like "Hey look! I made a comment that on the surface sounds insightful, but actually contains no substance, but it's cool because I am 43 years old a

Yep - I fly them all the time, and on my last flight to Hawaii, they rebooted a whole cabin.I think actually the AVOD manufacturer (Panasonic, maybe) chose Linux. And yeah, it's not necessarily as stable as your typical Linux desktop or laptop... but then, I haven't seen a Linux laptop with that cool "follow the plane" map program on it just yet.;)

"World Business Class" has a lot of cool technology, between the AVOD (which is touch-screen, too) and the seat. NW's back-office IS/IT is even cooler, as far

Between habitat destruction, energy usage, and pollution, "farming" is probably one of the most environmentally damaging industries out there. Since it's the only way to feed cities, yes, it's good to farm food. But farming non-food products is absolutely not automatically environmentally friendly by any stretch -and doesn't mean more trees in the world.There's a reason the same book freely downloaded from archive.org costs at least ten bucks to buy in dead tree form. It costs way more in terms of energy, r